I wish I'm a completely impartial person who can impart her judgments on the wisest of criteria. The Seeker makes me irritated and I hope no members of the rabid Cult of Demeter read this because Kathleen Nance may get weird voodoo dolls or whatever they use in her mailbox one day.

Rant ahead. It'll just be one paragraph long, I promise. Okay, three.

See, long, long ago Zeus, the Pimp Daddy Rapist Slut King God, pimps Persephone to his brother Hades, King of the Underworld. What Hades does is to kidnap Persephone to his kingdom, rapes her, and forces her to be his bride. Demeter, Persephone's mother, searches long and hard for her.

Ms Nance claims that Persephone and Hades are in love. Fine, coming from a reader of a genre that spawns books like that Sweet Savage Love, I'm hard-pressed to take the moral ground here. Besides, Stockholm Syndromes can be one helluva sexy fantasy.

But Ms Nance has to make Demeter a witch of a mother-in-law. Excuse me? And to add salt to the insult on mothers all over the world who love their daughters, Ms Nance names the villain of this story after poor maligned Demeter. It is one thing to revise mythology and make Zeus a Loving Daddy instead of a Pimp Daddy, but giving the finger to a mother who tries to save her daughter is the last straw. Hmmph!

Anyway, this story is about how the descendant of Hades, Hugh Pendragon - ex superspy hero - will fall for Lydia "Dia" Trelawny, a descendant of Leda, the poor gal who was raped by Zeus in swan form. Since Zeus and Hades are brothers, wouldn't that make Dia and Hugh close cousins? Anyway, we're talking about aliens here (according to the author, the Greek gods are actually aliens), so maybe they do things different from us. Farmers, lock up your sheep, please.

Dia is a magician, woo-hoo, but don't expect too much high flare jewel-thief stuff here. She is being blackmailed by bad, bad jewel thief Demetria (oh crap) to help that woman do bad, bad things. Worse, Dia's sister runs off with her current beau to some fun, exotic place (smart woman), dumping her kids at Dia's lap. What is Dia to do?

She goes to Hugh to ask the man to help her find her sister. Hugh is a retired superspy. Finding pesky elder sisters is just up his alley, right next to destroying mad overlords bent on conquering the world. But before they do anything, we have around 200 pages of what passes off for sexual banter: "I want! No, I don't want! I want but I am so shy! I want! I want, maybe later!"

At the same time, the author, for reasons I won't try to second-guess, tells me everything I need to know to defuse all my suspense as to what the bad guys are up to. So no suspense, not much anyway.

Hugh is a nice guy. Dia is a nice gal. But they are stuck in a story that doesn't go anywhere until it's too late. When it does kick into action, I'm already tuning out.